Excerpts  below from Norman O. Brown's Life against Death, comments by Koenigsberg 

BROWN: The unconscious can become conscious only through projection into the external world.  Human culture is a set of projections of the repressed unconscious. Like the transference, culture is created by the repetition compulsion, constantly producing new editions of infantile conflicts.  Like the transference, human culture exists in order to project the infantile complexes into concrete reality, where they can be seen and mastered.

Human culture is one vast arena in which the logic of the transference works itself out; the infantile fantasies which create the universal human neurosis cannot themselves be directly apprehended or mastered, but their derivatives in human culture can. 
 

KOENIGSBERG: We study the unconscious by observing how fantasies are projected into the external world. Culture is a transference neurosis. We "see" our fantasies by looking outward into the world. The world assumes a certain shape by virtue of the fantasies we project into it.

Looking outward, we imagine we are observing something other hand the self. everything we see "out there" is represents the projection of our desires and fantasies.

By virtual of denial, the fundamental mechanism governing the creation of culture, we imagine (or pretend) that what is out there is "coming to us" from afar.

A "discourse" is the transformation of a phantasy, taking hold upon us as if from the external world. But we have created these discourses, pretending they are something other than the self.